“And you, señor?” Sergeant Dregara, who had been sitting at the fire with Morillo’s sergeants, looked slyly up at Sharpe. “You will go early, too?”
“Good Lord, no!” Sharpe yawned. “I’m an English gentleman, Sergeant, and English gentlemen don’t stir till at least an hour after dawn.”
“And the Irish not for another hour after that,” Harper put in happily.
Dregara was a middle-aged runt of a man with yellow teeth, a lined face, a scarred forehead and the eyes of a killer. He was holding a half-empty bottle of clear Chilean brandy that he now gestured toward Sharpe. “Maybe we can ride south together, señor? There is sometimes safety in numbers.”
“Good idea,” Sharpe said in his best approximation of the braying voice some British officers liked to use. “And one of your men can bring us hot shaving water at, say, ten o’clock? Just tell the fellow to knock on the door and leave the bowl on the step.”
“Shaving water?” Dregara clearly hated being treated as a servant.
“Shaving water, Sergeant. Very hot. I can’t bear shaving in tepid water.”
Dregara managed to suppress his resentment. “Si, señor. At ten.”
The troopers wrapped themselves in blankets and lay down under the meager shelter of the fort’s firestep. The sentries paced overhead. Somewhere beyond the wall, in the forests that lapped against the ridge, a beast screamed. Sharpe, sleepless on the floor of Morillo’s quarters, listened to Harper’s snores. If Dregara was supposed to kill them, Sharpe thought, how would Bautista react when he heard they still lived? And why would Bautista kill them? It made no sense. Maybe Dregara meant no harm, but why would Morillo be ordered back to Valdivia? The questions flickered through Sharpe’s mind, but no answers came. It made sense, he supposed, that Bautista should resent Doña Louisa’s interest in her husband’s fate, for that interest could bring the scrutiny of Madrid onto this far, doomed colony, but was killing Louisa’s emissaries the way to avert such interest?
He slept at last, but it seemed he was woken almost immediately. Captain Morillo was shaking his shoulder. “You should go now, before the others stir. My Sergeant will open the gate. Wake up, sir!”
Sharpe groaned, turned over, groaned again. There had been a time when he could live on no sleep, but he felt too old for such tricks now. There was a pain in his back, and an ache in his right leg where a bullet had once lodged. “Oh, Jesus.”
“Dregara’s bound to be awake when my men leave, and he mustn’t see you,” Morillo hissed.
Sharpe and Harper pulled on their boots, strapped on their sword belts, slung their weapons, then carried their saddles, bags and the strongbox to the fort’s gate where a Sergeant let them out into the chill night. A moment later Morillo, together with a much smaller man, brought their horses. The mule was left behind in the fort to lull any suspicions Dregara might have.
“This is Ferdinand,” Morillo introduced the small man. “He’s your guide. He’ll take you across the hills and cut a good ten hours off your journey. He’s a picunche. He speaks no Spanish, I’m afraid, nor any other Christian language, but he knows what to do.”
“Picunche?” Sharpe asked.
He was given his answer as a cloud slid from the moon to reveal that Ferdinand, named for the King of Spain, was an Indian. He was a small, thin man, with a flat mask of a face, dressed in a tatter of a cast-off cavalry uniform decorated with bright feathers stuck into its loops and buttonholes. He wore no shoes and carried no weapon.
“Picunche is a kind of tribal name,” Morillo explained as he helped saddle Harper’s horse. “We use the Indians as scouts and guides. There aren’t many savages who are friendly to us. Don Blas wanted to recruit more, but that idea died with him.”
“Doesn’t Ferdinand have a horse?” Harper asked.
Morillo laughed. “He’ll outrun your horses over a day’s marching. He’ll also give you a fighting chance to stay well ahead of Sergeant Dregara.” Morillo tightened a girth strap, then stepped away. “Ferdinand will find his way back to me when he’s finished with you. Good luck, Colonel.”
Sharpe thanked the cavalry Captain. “How can we repay you?”
“Mention my name to Vivar’s widow. Say I was a true man to her husband.” Morillo was hoping that Doña Louisa would still have some influence in Spain, influence that would help his career when he was posted home again.
“I shall tell her you deserve whatever is in her gift,” Sharpe promised, then he pulled himself into the saddle and took the great strongbox onto his lap. “Good luck, Captain.”
“God bless you, señor. Trust Ferdinand!”
The Indian reached up and took hold of both horses’ bridles. The moon was flying in and out of ragged clouds, offering a bare light to the dark slope down which Ferdinand led their horses to where the trees closed over their heads. The main road went eastward, detouring about the thickly wooded country into which Ferdinand unerringly led them just as a bugle called its reveille up in the Celestial Fort. Sharpe laughed, pulled his hat over his eyes to protect them from the twigs and followed a savage to the south.
At dawn they rode through the forests of morning, hung with mists, spangled with a million beads of dew that were given light by the lancing, slanting rays of the rising sun. Drifts of vapor softened the great tree trunks among which a myriad of bright birds flew. The clouds had cleared, gone back to the mountains or blown out to the endless oceans. Ferdinand had relinquished the horses’ bridles and was content simply to lead the way through the towering trees. “I wonder where the hell we are,” Harper said.
“Ferdinand knows,” Sharpe replied, and the mention of his royal name made the small Indian turn and smile with file-sharpened teeth.
“We could have done with a few hundred of him at Waterloo,” Harper said. “They’d have frightened the buggers to death by just grinning at them.”
They rode on. At times, when the path was especially steep or slippery, they dismounted and led the horses. Once they circled a hill on a narrow path above a chasm of pearl-bright mist. Strange birds screeched at them. The worst moment of the morning came when Ferdinand brought them to a great canyon that was crossed by a perilously fragile bridge made of leather, rope and green wood. The green wood slats were held in place by the twisted leather straps and the whole precarious roadway was suspended from the rope cables. Ferdinand made gestures at Sharpe and Harper, grunting the while in a strange language.
“I think,” Harper said, “he wants us to cross one at a time. God save Ireland, but I think I’d rather not cross at all.”
It was a terrifying crossing. Sharpe went first and the whole structure shivered and swayed with every step he took. Ferdinand followed Sharpe, leading his blindfolded horse. Despite its blindfold the horse was nervous and trembling. Once, when the mare missed her footing and plunged a hoof through the slats, she began to panic, but Ferdinand soothed and calmed the beast. Far beneath Sharpe the mist shredded to reveal a white thread which was a quick-flowing stream deep in the canyon’s jungle.
Harper was white with terror when he finished the crossing. “I’d rather face the Imperial bloody Guard than do that again.”
They remounted and rode on, taking it in turns to balance the great box of golden guineas on their saddles’ pommels. Ferdinand loped tirelessly ahead. Harper, chewing a lump of hard bread, had begun to think of Bautista. “Why does that long-nosed bastard want to kill us?”
“God knows. I’ve been trying to make sense of it, and I can’t.”
Harper shook his head. “I mean if the man wants to be rid of us, then why the hell doesn’t he just let us take Don Blas’s body and be away? Why send those fellows to kill us?”
“If he did send them.” Sharpe, as the morning unfolded into sun-drenched innocence, had again begun to doubt the fears that had crowded in on him during the night.
“He sent them, right enough,” Harper said. “He’s an evil bastard, that Bautista. You only had to look in his eye. If a man like that co
mes into the tavern I throw him out. I won’t have him drinking my ale!”
“I don’t know if he’s evil,” Sharpe said, “but he’s certainly frightened.”
“Bautista? Frightened?” Harper was scornful.
“He’s like a man playing drumhead.” Drumhead was a card game that had been popular in the army. It was a simple game, needing only a pack of cards, as many players as wanted to risk their money and a playing surface like a drumhead. Each player nominated a card and another man dealt the cards face up onto the drumhead. The man whose card appeared last won the game.
“Drumhead?” Harper was still unconvinced.
“Bautista’s playing for very big stakes, Patrick. He’s cheating left, right and center and he knows, if he’s caught, that he’ll face court martial, disgrace, maybe even imprisonment. But if he wins, then he wins very big indeed. He’s watching the cards turn over and he’s dreading that he’ll lose. But he can’t stop playing because the winnings are so huge.”
“Then why the hell doesn’t he fight the war properly?” Harper grunted as he settled the strongbox more comfortably on his pommel.
“Because he knows the war is lost,” Sharpe said. “It would take an extraordinary soldier to win this war, and Bautista isn’t an extraordinary soldier. Don Blas might have won it, but only if Madrid had sent him the ships to beat Cochrane, which they didn’t. So Bautista knows he’s going to lose, and that means he has to do two things. First, he needs to blame someone else for losing the war, and second, he has to grab as much of Chile’s wealth as possible. Then he can go home rich and blameless, and he can use the money to gain power in Madrid.”
“But why kill us? We’re bugger all to do with his problems.”
“We’re the enemy,” Sharpe said. “The closest Bautista came to losing was when Don Blas was here. Don Blas knew something that would destroy Bautista, and he was on the point of confronting Bautista when he died. We’re on Don Blas’s side, so we’re enemies.” It was the only answer that made sense to Sharpe, and though it was an answer full of gaps, it helped to explain the Captain-General’s enmity.
“So he’ll kill us?” Harper asked indignantly.
Sharpe nodded. “But not in public. If we can reach Puerto Crucero, we’re safe. Bautista needs to blame our disappearance on the rebels. He won’t dare attack us in a public place.”
“I pray to God you’re right,” Harper said feelingly. “I mean there’s no point in dying here, is there now?”
Sharpe felt a pang of guilt for having invited his friend. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“That’s what Isabella said. But, Goddamn it, a man gets tired of children after a time. I’m glad to be away for a wee while, so I am.” Harper had left four children in Dublin: Richard, Liam, Sean and the baby, Michael, whose real name was in a Gaelic form that Sharpe could not pronounce. “But I wouldn’t want never to see the nippers again,” Harper went on, “would I now?”
“There’s not much to do now,” Sharpe tried to reassure him. “We just have to dig up Don Blas, seal him in a tin coffin, then take him home.”
“I still think you should put him in brandy,” Harper said, his fears forgotten.
“Whatever’s quickest,” Sharpe allowed, then he forgot that small problem, for Ferdinand had led them out from the trees and onto what had to be the main road from Valdivia to Puerto Crucero. The road stretched empty and inviting in either direction, and with no sign of any vengeful pursuers. Ferdinand was grinning, then said something in his own language.
“I think he means he’s leaving us here,” Harper said before pointing vigorously to the south.
Ferdinand nodded eagerly, intimating that they should indeed ride in that direction.
Sharpe opened the box, took out a guinea, and gave it to the Indian. Ferdinand tucked the coin into a pocket of his filthy uniform, offered a sharp-toothed grin of thanks, then turned back into the forest. Sharpe and Harper, brought safe to the road and far ahead of their pursuers, were out of danger. Ahead lay Puerto Crucero and a friend’s grave, behind was a thwarted enemy, and Sharpe, almost for the first time since he had reached the New World, felt his hopes rise.
That evening, just before sunset, they reined their tired horses on the rocky crest above the natural harbor of Puerto Crucero. Sharpe, weary to his very bones, turned in his aching saddle and saw no sign of any pursuit. Dregara had been cheated. Sharpe and Harper, thanks to Captain Morillo and his Indian guide, had come safely to their haven where, like a sorcerer’s castle perched on a crag, stood the Citadel of Puerto Crucero.
At the heart of the Citadel, and brilliant white in the day’s last sunlight, stood the garrison church where Blas Vivar lay buried. Beside the church was a castle keep over which, streaming stiff in the sea’s hard wind, the great royal banner of Spain flew colorful and proud. The dark, wild country where murder might have been committed was behind them and in front were witnesses and light. There was also the harbor from which, by God’s grace, they would sail home with the body of a dead hero.
The harbor was not a massive refuge like Valdivia’s magnificent haven, but instead lay within a wide hook of low, rocky land that stopped the surge of the Pacific swells, but allowed the insistent southern winds to tug and fret at the anchorage. Even now the harbor was flecked with white by the wind that streamed the royal banner at the fort’s summit.
The town was built where an inner harbor had been made with a stone breakwater. The town itself was a huddle of warehouses, fishing shacks and small houses. Nothing could move in the town or harbor without being observed from the great high fortress. The road to the fort zig-zagged up the rock hill to disappear into a tunnel that pierced a wide stone wall studded with cannon embrasures. “A bastard of a fort to take,” Harper said.
“Then thank God we don’t need to.” Sharpe flourished the pass which gave them entry to the citadel.
The pass, signed and sealed by Miguel Bautista, worked its charm. Sharpe and Harper were saluted at every guardpost, escorted through the fortress’s entrance tunnel, and greeted effusively by the officer of the day, a Major Suarez, who seemed somewhat astonished by the pass. In all likelihood, Sharpe suspected, Suarez had never seen such a document, for Sharpe suspected it had been issued only to lull him into a false sense of security, but now, even if Bautista had not so intended, his signature was working a wonderful magic.
“You’ll accept our hospitality?” Major Suarez was standing behind his desk, eager to show Sharpe and Harper due respect. “There is an inn beside the harbor, but I can’t recommend it. You’ll permit me to have two officers’ rooms made ready for you?”
“And a meal?” Harper suggested.
“Of course!” Suarez, assuming that Bautista was their patron, could not do enough to help. “Perhaps you will wait in my quarters while the room and the food are made ready?”
“I’d rather see the church,” Sharpe said.
“I’ll send for you as soon as things are ready.” Suarez snapped his fingers, summoning ostlers to take care of the tired horses, and orderlies to carry the travelers’ bags for safekeeping into the officers’ quarters. Sharpe and Harper kept only the strongbox which they carried between them into the welcome coolness of the garrison church, a building of stern beauty. The walls were painted white while the heavily beamed ceiling was of a shining wood that had been oiled almost to blackness. On the walls were marble slabs that commemorated officers who had died in this far colony. Some had been killed in skirmishes, some had drowned off the coast, some had died in earthquakes, and a few, very few, had died of old age. Other marble plaques remembered the officers’ families: women who had died in childbirth, children who had been killed or captured by Indians and babies who had died of strange diseases and whose souls were now commended to God.
Sharpe and Harper put the strongbox down in the nave, then walked slowly through the choir to climb the steps to the altar, which was a magnificent confection of gold and silver. Crucifixes, candle holders and ewe
rs graced the niches and shelves of the intricate altar screen on which painted panels depicted the torture and death of Christ.
Many of the flagstones close to the altar were gravestones. Some had ornate coats of arms carved above the names, and most of the inscriptions were in Latin, which meant Sharpe could not read them; yet even without Latin he could see that none of the stones bore the name of his friend. Then Harper moved aside a small rush mat that had covered a paving slab to the right of the altar and thus discovered Don Blas’s grave. “Here,” Harper said softly, then crossed himself. The stone bore two simple letters chiseled into its surface. BV.
“Poor bastard,” Sharpe said gently. There were times when he found his lack of any religion a handicap. He supposed he should say a prayer, but the sight of his old friend’s grave left him feeling inadequate. Don Blas himself would have known what to say, for he had always possessed a graceful sureness of touch, but Sharpe felt awkward in the hushed church.
“You want to start digging?” Harper asked.
“Now?” Sharpe sounded surprised.
“Why not?” Harper had spotted some tools in a side chapel where workmen had evidently been repairing a wall. He fetched a crowbar and worked it down beside the slab. “At least we can see what’s under the stone.”
Sharpe expected to find a vault under the gravestone, but they levered up the heavy slab to find instead a patch of flattened yellow shingle.
“Christ only knows how deep he is,” Harper said, then drove the crowbar hard into the gravel. Sharpe went to the side chapel and came back with a trowel that he used to scrape aside the stones and sand that Harper had loosened with the crowbar. “We’ll probably have to go down six feet,” Harper grumbled, “and it’ll take us bloody hours.”